Wildflowers and Dictionaries

Posted on by Sandy Webster

A young woman came to my door this week and before she entered the foyer, she handed me these. A bouquet of wildflowers that as soon as she was gone had to be placed outside as the goldenrod makes Lee sneeze. I can not remember the last time someone gave me a bunch of wildflowers all tied up. They are so much more magical than flowers from a florist. It might be the sense of urgency they project. And a bouquet like this can’t help but be received with a sudden smile of thankfulness.

She had called a few days before from Nashville, Tennessee to ask if she could come by to see me and talk about my art practice. How could I say no to that. An interest in combining art with what the natural world has to offer is her passion for now as she sorts out what to do next in her very young life. I showed her my work using earth pigments and constructions of altered plant materials. Then gave her a copy of my book after getting her contact information. There will be other things I can think to share with her somewhere down the line.

Something else I came across this past week was a letter to and from the Merriam-Webster dictionary offices.

I keep it in the back of my dictionary.

The background story is that in 2004 I had finished reading The Life of Pi. In the conclusion of the story it seemed that the evidence of a meerkat was in question. I was quite sure at the time that I knew what one was…but I must add right here that even now spellcheck is questioning me. Anyway, I went to my dictionary to look the word up and found it was not there….nowhere was the word “meerkat”.

I wrote to Merriam-Webster and unfortunately did not keep a copy of that original inquiry as to why the word was not there.

Here is their response:

April 5, 2004

Dear Ms. Webster

You did not mention which Merriam-Webster dictionary you are referring to, but I assume it must be Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary since meerkat was not included in the ninth edition (the one you apparently own). I can’t say for sure why it wasn’t included, but I can tell you that meerkat was entered in the tenth edition of the Collegiate published in 1993 and is still there for the eleventh edition published last year.

Since the English language is constantly changing, you might want to consider purchasing a more recently published dictionary at some point. For the Collegiate Dictionary, for instance, we typically add 10,000 new words and senses for each new edition. Thank you for writing. Feel free to write again.

Sincerely

Joan Narmontas

My response back to Joan on April 9, 2004

Dear Joan,

Thank you for your prompt reply. The dictionary I own that lays open covering the top of the “Information Center” and where the word meerkat is absent is a 1989 Webster’s Enclycopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the Enblish Language.

Surrounded with these books in all their permutations, you may not fully appreciate the value of a dictionary just sitting open at the height of a bent elbow. It is a 1,854-page invitation to learn and reaffirm what knowledge we have regarding meaning, pronunciation and spelling, not to mention the location of places and names in history. The pleasing pattern of a notched fore edge that seduces the fingertips into moving from one set of paired letters to another if for no other reason than to feel that place and flip whole sections of fluttering pages forward and backward.

And the Illustrations! On pages 278-279 there are drawings of a Clipper ship, Clipper bow, Cloister, and Close helmet with its Visor, Ventail and Beaver carefully labeled. How can anyone resist these small, well-placed visual definitions? Just the other day my husband (the same delightful man who built the “Information Center”) brought me an old hand forged iron piece to use in my artwork. “I think it is a clevis or something like that”, he said. We immediately turned to the dictionary and found a picture of a clevis, which clarified that what we had, was the hook that a clevis was constructed for in the first place.

When our children were growing up, every Sunday morning at breakfast we had to all come to the table with a new word. Pronounce it, spell it, define it and use it in a sentence — then you could eat. Our dictionaries have always been used and loved for what they bring into our lives.

So far I have had to add a piece of paper with the formula to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and I see no reason why I can’t simply place the definition for meerkat in the same way….tucked in at page 891 where the word megajoule sits in upper right, just begging to be read about at the bottom of the page and insisting I moisten my finger to turn the page and view a megathere. I love this book. Keep making them.

Best regards,

Sandy Webster

 

I put these letters about our use and love of a dictionary in this blog with the bouquet of wildflowers because I wonder if these are things of the past.

It would be a shame if they were.

To rely on “spellcheck” all the time can be a mistake, especially when they question “meerkat” and want to turn it into “marketeer”. To use an app that is supposed to identify plants is also not such a good idea. Recently mine could not even recognize a Japanese maple. I still turn to my Audubon and Peterson books for identifications so I can turn actual pages, see a variety of illustrations and read.

Enough.

Til next time when there seems to be something to say or show.

Making Adjustments

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Three years ago the crepe myrtles outside the studio looked like this….manageable and quite pretty.

But this year they really grew tall and floppy, so the woodsman was called in.

Now they look like this. Next spring they can start over.

We walked at the dam again this morning. It is getting chillier out there. For some reason this Canadian goose decided to leave his group and turned back to stay behind….complaining all the time.

Here is a picture of the river birch or paper birch in the yard two days ago when the late sun was doing its best to cheer things up.

There is more maintenance to do around the house and yard, more than Lee can do anymore. It is strange to come to grips with the idea that some of the most simple tasks that I took for granted he was doing or could do are just a bit out of reach. Since there is just the two of us living here, those tasks fall to me.

I can do them but it is the remembering to do them before heading off to bed early with my kindle so as to get up at four a.m. to prepare for the gym. While I am gone he takes his shower and starts his toast. He used to make the coffee every morning but forgot the sequence. Now I prepare it the day before so all he has to do is push the “on” button.

Anyway with the art group here last Sunday and everyone showing their work, I got to thinking, “What to work on now that the samples for the class, Books All About the Stitch is over?”

I need something that I can leave at a moments notice. Something I can control size-wise, and of course, something that has meaning.

So after taking apart this old sketchbook and removing the signature that had drawings from my now deceased brother’s home, (the fact that they were still there in the book prevented me from continuing to use it) I am working on a new idea.

The cover paper that covers the board is an egg tempera painting I did of a collected nest. The binding for the pigments was glaire and not egg yolk. Glaire is what is made from the egg white and used on more flexible surfaces. The size is about 9 inches by 11 inches.

Anyway back to what it is being used for now. I drew the outline of one of my hands and am filling in the space with all the things that are now falling into my hands to do. Here is the start of the first hand.

This will be easily filled in to the wrist which is just to the left of the deer. He still feeds the deer but sometimes needs reminding. It will all fill in like the index finger is.

I will continue to make pairs of hands in the sketchbook. One hand on each page. I might try different ways of holding my hands but not sure how good an outline that would be as far as seeing that it is a hand.

These should be not only therapeutic but a good reminder of what has been added to my list of things to do. And what else I like about this idea is that the images are all random which is so much like it is as he needs help or just stops doing something.

I think that if someone else was going through this and they could not draw or did not want to, they could fill the outlined hand with words of what needs attention. A hand full of written tasks going in all directions. It would be also very interesting visually.

Okay, enough. Til later.

Finishing Up The Stitched Australia Book

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Here is the finished book with its wrap tie. I got to use the last two small pieces of wood patterned by Toni Rogers in Queensland.  All threads used in the book came from Australia.

And besides using Australian tea to color the pages and shellac that I bought in Australia, I used my little geometry set bought in Brisbane many years ago to make circles, etc. Even my needles came from Richmond, Tasmania.

The images were harvested from this book.

There is something magic and charming and educational about all the pictures used in this book to tell a bit about the settling of Australia.

I used a coptic binding for the folios and spacers in the book.

And after I got all the folios shellacked, tea dyed and stitched I put them into some sort of order of settling the land.

I realized that I wanted it a bit thicker and had this picture of four surveyors/telegraph workers sitting there. The reason it sat there was because it is my romantic idea of what a true Australian male looks like. In fact several years ago while teaching in the Northern Territory the assistant to the Craft Alliance there introduced me to her husband. She knew I would like him because he had this look of pure Australian bloke. When she finished work that week he was going to take her on trip around the perimeter of the continent on his motorcycle. He had that truly capable look about him and had me grinning in his company. Any one of the men below could have been related.

Anyway aside from all that, these men in the picture and two more random images became the in between two-folio signatures to make the book larger and eliminate seeing the empty space between those folios.

 

I liked how they inserted themselves into the other images and the country. It might matter that I listened to Lyle Lovett music while I put these boys into the book.

There are other images, lots of other ones of people settling into the country, displacing the aboriginal culture.  And kangaroos.

And the convicts….all accused of one of the nineteen crimes that got them deported to the other side of the world.

I will stop here and maybe figure that I have enough samples and books that involve the stitch. There are only four in the class so far and I have no idea until I start teaching where each of their interests lie.

It will be my last class taught for John C Campbell Folk School here in Brasstown, NC. Thirty years and six months is quite enough. I look forward to really enjoying this last one and hope the students do as well.

Til next week when I can show pretty outside pictures again.

Drawing and Stitching

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Here is part of the herd that Lee feeds each morning. We had to wait for them to cross over the road before heading off to drop our absentee ballots off at the voting center. We pretend we are not here so as to avoid the crowds….at least we are hoping there are crowds this year.

In the studio I attempted to draw the ovenbird. This time in graphite and colored pencil. I am not good with colored pencils. They seem too soft, too mushy on the paper….and the colors are really terrible. You need to do so much blending to get anything near the right color and then they are even mushier. See what I mean?

There is no way I can get the blackness of this bird’s eye.

I think that colored pencils should be used for soft rose petals or chenille bedspreads and nothing else. And since I have no roses or a bedspread like that, I put them back in their boxes and will stay with the mechanical pencil, eraser (another thing you can’t do with colored pencils is ERASE!) and a bit of watercolor if I am doing birds…..or anything for that matter.

But on to other things. I am still doing some ideas for books that are all about the stitch. I found an old picture book of Australia. One I just collected and glanced through. All the illustrations with very little text are black and white old drawings, etc.

So I trimmed the sheets after carefully clipping the sewing threads to remove folios. Now here I am beginning to stitch with threads I can only get in Australia. It is a unwaxed linen by Guttermann.

It was fun to pull out just a few folios and then arrange the sized sheets into a bit of story. With so few words, the book was much more about the illustrations. But the whole book was so “Aussie” and the roughness of those who settled there.

I loved this page about the loneliness of shepherds, etc who needed a mate to spend time with. The ratio at the time was eleven men to one woman so the land owners would send them off with a mate. And according to this interpretation, that is where the common expression of “mates” in Australia originated.

The tool I am pressing down the stitching with after the design is made is a sewing tool that Jane Nicolas gave me. It is very handy for pressing folds in cloth as was its original intention but also good for pressing threads into paper and closing up the holes.

The images are very mid 1800s. Lots of tough, “sinewy” manly explorers. Even my favorites, Burke and Wills get some notice.

This morning I cooked up some Australia black tea that comes in a canvas bag from down under. After shellacking dots on the pages, I stained them with some tea.

So far there are only three signatures of two folios done to this point and I am not sure if I am through surface designing or sewing yet. But at least it is something to show students on sewing into the paper, illustration and text.

These pages after folded in the center and cut down are about 4.5 x 8 inches. The original book is about 9 x 10 inches in size. There are loads more to choose from.

Not sure what next to do with them but for now will catch up the other four signatures to this same point and take a good look and where it wants to go next.

Til next week.